LEA (LowEndAdmin) is the original founder of LowEndBox and the visionary who gave rise to an entire movement around minimalist, efficient hosting. In 2008, LEA launched LowEndBox with a simple but powerful idea: that it was possible to run meaningful applications, web servers, VPNs, mail servers, and more – on small, low-cost virtual machines with minimal resources.
At a time when most infrastructure discussions were dominated by high-end servers and enterprise platforms, LEA championed the opposite approach: lightweight Linux distros, self-managed servers, open source software, and thoughtful optimization. This philosophy gave birth to the term “Low End Box”, which would come to define a new genre of hosting tailored to developers, tinkerers, and budget-conscious users around the world.
Through LowEndBox and its companion forum, LowEndTalk, LEA built the foundation for what would become one of the most active and enduring communities in the hosting world, prioritizing knowledge-sharing, transparency, and accessibility.
After several years of nurturing the site and community, LEA stepped away from active involvement, passing the torch to a new generation of admins, contributors, and moderators. Today, LEA remains a respected figure in the LowEnd ecosystem, credited with launching a platform and philosophy that continues to influence thousands of infrastructure providers and users globally.
LowEndBox’s legacy, and its thriving community, is a direct result of LEA’s original vision.
So far I’m very happy with HostMist. I signed up for Lightning, with 15% discount. There was an initial glitch in creating the VPS, but they answered my support ticket within 10 minutes. After that, everything has been great.
The VPS is very fast. The host it’s running on doesn’t seem to be overly crowded.
12:23:50 up 2 days, 22:28, 2 users, load average: 0.02, 0.05, 0.01
I don’t know if the load averages take into account the load on the entire host, or just my VPS. I’m not an OpenVZ expert by any means.
Bandwidth is good, too.
Overall, I’m a happy customer.